The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made

by Flora Miller Biddle

  I had come upon a treasure. I strongly felt that a biography of my grandmother was in order. After some discussion with Mum, I asked Bob Friedman if he’d be interested in writing Gertrude’s biography. Despite having just completed his biography of Jackson Pollock, Energy Made Visible, he accepted — on condition that he’d have free rein, and that I would work on it, too, doing research, obtaining entrée to people we needed to interview, places he needed to see, and arranging the material I’d found.

  Organizing this mass of stuff was harder than I could have imagined, and figuring out who was who in Gertrude’s complex life was like unraveling the ultimate mystery story. Sometimes, I worried that Gertrude would have minded our intrusiveness, but I told myself that she’d have destroyed her journals and letters had she not wanted them to be found some day. All the protagonists were dead, anyway — and, by then, it was too late to change my mind. I was completely caught up in her life, in her personality. I also enjoyed witnessing the writing process.

  Along with earning college credits for this work, I took other courses. I remember driving in to New York to meet with Bob, notebook on the seat next to me, trying to memorize the digestive system for my physiology exam.

  Slowly, we reconstructed my grandmother’s world.

  In the summer of 1972, at eighty-five, my father became ill with emphysema from years of smoking, even though he’d stopped smoking in the ’60s after learning of cigarettes’ deathly toll. He wasn’t sick for long, but with his weakened lungs, he wasn’t able to recover from pneumonia, and died in the Doctor’s Hospital in New York. He’d painted right up until the end, although a bad hip pained him considerably.

  That very year, just after his last birthday, his beloved cousin, Betty Tuckerman, sent me a package of letters he had written her. In thanking her, I wrote, “he surpasses himself constantly. I can never get over his enormous capacity for appreciation and enjoyment of all facets of life and people — it’s miraculous, and catching, don’t you think? And I just know what an effort it must be for him to even get out of bed in the morning — yet the pleasure he provides for others never ceases, on the contrary it always seems to increase. …”

  Feeling ever closer to him, I had never thought of my father as being old. With his youthful spirit, it seemed he could never age and die. Always ready to hear news of the children, wanting to know about my studies, my friends, and my life, he’d comment and advise pertinently. He saw the amusing and bright side of everything and was never gloomy. After his death I kept finding bits of his life — a paintbrush, water cup, and sketchpad; his clothes, which fitted my sons Duncan and Cully, who still wear some of them; his humorous rhyming, illustrated “jingles,” full of his love of beautiful women and his teasing, funny thoughts about them, wonderful today in their political incorrectness. And everywhere, on walls or leaning against them, in drawers, or in closets, his watercolors. Jewels, like my father’s living self.

  We missed him terribly. For our mother, the loss was crushing. After an initial effort to be gallant, to travel, to keep up with friends, she withdrew more and more.

  We worried. About her loneliness, about her depression. As Bob and I moved deeper into our project, we realized how much we needed her memories. Suddenly our research became a pathway to renewed interest for Mum. We wanted to make Gertrude fully human, to include whatever faults we might discover along with her virtues. Moreover, we wanted my mother to agree, and to hear our discoveries. To my surprise and delight, Mum was fascinated by everything we found out about her adored mother, including her lovers.

  As the book took shape, I would read it aloud to her, flying to Hobe Sound two or three times during the winters so she could keep up with it, tape recording our interviews, or taking notes, which she much preferred. She objected to almost nothing. The wording in Bob’s account of an early relationship, a hint of a lesbian friend, offended her, and Bob softened it. Otherwise, she remained marvelously open to all I’d learned, to the passionate letters I read to her, to all the romance of her mother’s life, its joys and sorrows. So much she hadn’t known.

  Those were precious times for me.

  They brought me a different sort of renewal than they did for Mum. As I studied its origins, from its genesis around 1907 through its early years as Whitney Studio, Whitney Studio Club, Whitney Studio Galleries, and finally as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum came to new life.

  And, as I learned about my grandmother’s weaknesses, I became more forgiving of mine. While investigating her strengths, I reached for my own. Gertrude’s adventures and passions stirred within me. They made me feel that I could, and should, carry the flame.

  I was living in part in the early 1900s, absorbed by my grandmother’s ardent “crushes” and the beginnings of her life as a sculptor, and also, in part, in the ’70s, protesting the Vietnam war and the draft. The Museum stayed fixed, a continuing presence. During these years around 1972, I met a man who would become one of the most significant figures of my Museum life.

  Anne Zinsser, an old and dear friend, invited Mike and me to meet a brilliant couple who, she said, were closely involved with art. Anne knew Sally Ganz through their work as public school volunteers, and had invited her and Victor Ganz to Connecticut for the weekend. So, one winter night, we all sat around the fireplace, with Murdock the parrot a talkative presence in the background.

  Sally, a petite beauty in her early sixties, had dignity, elegance, great warmth, and an especially wonderful smile. I was immediately drawn to her. Then when Victor greeted me, I felt his intellect and intensity flow right through his handshake and into mine. At once, I noticed the direct gaze of his brown eyes; behind horn-rim glasses, they gave me the once-over. Victor’s compact energy suffused the room like smoke from the fire. If we had a few moments of small talk, I don’t remember them. As soon as possible, Victor gave me his views about the Whitney Museum. He had come prepared. I sat almost silent. By the time we left, I was shattered. Could Victor possibly be right? He was so convincing. He seemed to care so much.

  The Whitney, said Victor, had every opportunity to be a great museum. This was America’s moment in the sun: Paris had been the center of the art world, but was old and tired — few young artists were emerging there. All the excitement was right here, and the Whitney wasn’t looking. We hadn’t bought the best artists when they were young and cheap, and we’d probably never be able to catch up now. We’d had the opportunity, we’d had the responsibility to the public, and we’d completely muffed it.

  Victor went into detail, with harsh criticisms of Lloyd’s and Jack’s conservatism and aesthetic myopia.

  “How can you allow this situation?” he finished. “Why do you want it to be the ‘good gray Whitney?’ With all there is right now to see and show?”

  Anne was shocked to see my distress. Yet, despite feeling the criticism so deeply and personally, I was more and more interested in all Victor said. His words stayed with me through all that followed in the next years.

  A few years later, when he became a close friend, when he became a trustee of the Whitney and gave it so much of his caring intelligence and leadership, we talked of that evening.

  At that moment, though, his rebukes just simmered inside me, awaiting the right moment to respond.

  How come I didn’t know, had never even heard of, the Ganzes?

  In the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, Victor and Sally had assembled a major collection of Picasso’s work; when it became too expensive, they had started in 1961 to collect young American artists. Victor’s educated, seemingly infallible eye had led him to Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Eva Hesse, and Frank Stella before most connoisseurs had recognized them. Now the Ganzes were collecting, among others, Dorothea Rockburne, Richard Tuttle, and Mel Bochner. The Ganzes’ world revolved around the artists they collected, the art historians and critics who wrote about them, and the curators and dealers who showed them. As a trustee of the only museum of contemporary American
art anywhere, I certainly should have known about Victor and Sally Ganz.

  Meanwhile, to better organize the Whitney, to keep it within its budget, David identified, and Jack hired, capable and lively Steven Weil, the first person to hold the position of administrator, who took over much of the day-to-day running of the Museum. Steve also initiated a series of events heretofore considered peripheral to our main purpose: concerts, poetry readings, dances, just when artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were creating and participating in mixed-media performances and “happenings.” Everything from Twyla Tharp, to John Cage, to Moon Dog (a street musician), to Duke Ellington, near his life’s end — how well I remember his intent, serious expression, the grace and style with which he played, as we sat on the bluestone floor on gray foam rubber squares, hushed, near reverent. In another mode, Grace Slick and her band, Jefferson Airplane, almost caused a riot, so many people wanted to come, including our own family; during the intermission, I remember, the band retired to the trustees room for a few drugs, sending the staff into a panic! It was marvelous to find ourselves dancing around in the huge fourth-floor gallery, cleared of art and dividing walls, to Gracie’s pounding rhythms.

  Steve’s presence gave Jack more time for art. At the time, he was working with the Museum’s most generous patron since my grandmother, a man who gave more sculpture than anyone ever had: Howard Lipman. A partner at Neuburger, Berman, Howard, like his partner, Roy Neuberger, had once hoped to become an artist himself. He still identified strongly with sculptors such as Alexander Calder, Louise Nevelson, Lucas Samaras, and David Smith. Head of the Friends’ acquisitions committee in the early ’60s, Howard, a trustee since 1969, was passionately devoted to sculpture, and wholly committed, as well, to the idea of public collections. He’d set up a foundation with his wife, Jean, to acquire work, mostly by young artists, mostly for the Whitney. Howard and Jack made a great team. Because of them, the Whitney today has a comprehensive collection of contemporary American sculpture. The Calders alone are extraordinary. In the memorial book about my mother, the “Flora” book, Howard recounts his first meeting of the Friends’ acquisition committee, giving a glimpse of my mother’s effect on people:

  “I carried with me to this first meeting, with some concern, some photographs of Alexander Calder’s new, large stabiles. Calder was well known at that time for his mobiles, but in 1961 his large stabiles had had just one small exhibition in New York. … I nervously awaited a response while the photos were passed around the table. The response took a long time to come, finally from just one person — Mrs. Miller. Her enthusiasm was exciting and for me inspiring. I instantly realized a warm appreciation and affection for Flora Miller that was to continue for the rest of our relationship — till the end of her life. As the meeting broke up, the last as well as the first word was from Flora Miller: ‘Don’t let that Calder get away from us.’”

  One purchase that astounded and displeased a few trustees was Robert Smithson’s Non Site (Palisades, Edgewater, N.J.). A big painted aluminum box, hollow but with bands on the edges to look like drawers, filled with rocks from the Palisades. A box of rocks? Outrageous! Ridiculous! But even about such an “ugly” work, Jack’s and Howard’s eloquence persuaded most doubters. No longer unconventional today, it looks like an elegant precursor to much “serial” art, and “earthworks” too.

  Always, I felt close to the curators.

  Especially to Marcia Tucker. At first, through her articulate love of art, and then because we became close friends. She cared passionately for the most advanced art — Richard Tuttle’s, for instance. The insight she gave me about his work was so important to my own search for understanding — a measure of Marcia’s qualities as well as Tuttle’s.

  His dealer, Jock Truman, a prescient sensitive soul, had first introduced me to Richard, and also to his work. Drawn to his intensity and searching mind, I was intrigued by his curious poetic pieces: thin slabs of wood leaning on the floor against a wall; octagonal hemstitched, dyed, wrinkled fabric; a tiny wire on a big wall; a series of delicate watercolors. Difficult, at first, because they were unknown, unpretentious, fugitive.

  Richard installed a piece in our apartment, a white paper octagon he cut out and smeared with paste on the dining room table, then ran down the hall to press on the bedroom wall before the glue could dry. I loved the way it changed the room, white free form against a white grid of the bricks, deep space magically expanding that small room, changing with the light and with my perception. Was it part of the wall? Was the wall part of it? Was it a drawing or a sculpture? Was it sitting atop the wall or was it a white void, like Nirvana or death? With it nearby, the last thing I saw at night and the first thing I saw when I awoke, I seemed to dream deeper, and the day held unlimited potential.

  In 1975, Marcia Tucker curated an exhibition of Richard’s work for the Whitney. No catalogue was planned until later, since he’d be making three different installations during the time of the show. I couldn’t stay away as he glued or hung or placed his pieces. Marcia was the first to tell me, and Richard the first to convince me, that the viewer must contribute to the work, providing half the experience.

  The bit of rope Richard nailed on a wall changes, then changes again: at first, the tiny, ragged threads are me, lost in the vast, smooth, impenetrable world of the wall. Later, the rope holds the huge white wall, with enormous power. Rough against smooth, little against big, it holds the promise and the contradictions within us all. In pieces made with wire, pencil, and shadow, Richard confounds boundaries between art, reality, and illusion. He transforms my perception of a cloud or a crack in the pavement or a weathered painted wall — I see beauty, suddenly, where I’ve never seen it before. Looking at Richard’s work, talking with him, I feel enlightened.

  Accustomed to viewing framed paintings on walls, or sculptures on pedestals, now we’re seeing new possibilities. Art can be anywhere, can be made of anything. Using ordinary materials for art objects transforms their ordinariness, and makes the common precious, makes it ourselves.

  I remember that show so well. During an installation, someone, maybe Marcia, asked me to try to calm down a fractious reporter who was scorching mad, saying he was being fooled by a charlatan, and by a Museum that didn’t deserve the name. “The emperor’s new clothes,” he seethed. I begged him to be quiet, saying the artist could hear him, but he didn’t give a hoot, and I guided him to the elevator as quickly as I could. “Why,” I asked him as he left, “do you think you’re so upset about work which means, as you say, nothing?”

  He was, finally, speechless.

  Reviewing Tuttle’s exhibition for the Times, Hilton Kramer wrote the first of a series of hostile articles about Whitney shows. Hostile, not because they were critical, but because they denied the work the status of art, robbed the artists of their dignity, and were personally vindictive about artists, curators, and the Museum. Kramer’s review of Tuttle’s show kept many people away, preventing them from making up their own minds. I resented this, and still do today, when Richard is widely recognized throughout the world. The ideas he introduced strongly influenced younger artists — the use of modest materials, the ephemeral nature of art.

  Richard was dismayed by the negative response, a feeling that remains with him still. He was trying to express something tender and innocent, and he found the responses, the aggressive articles, letters, and people, disturbing. He has described going to visit his mother in wintertime on the train, during the exhibition at the Whitney, and how he stood freezing between the cars because he’d been so horrified by the critical attacks of strangers. He couldn’t bear to be with people he didn’t know.

  Richard and his wife, poet Mei Mei Bersenbrugge, and their daughter, Martha, lived near us in New Mexico and now in New York as well. We have become good friends. Richard is as intense and creative as ever, whether building an adobe house on a mesa, playing a game with his daughter, making art, caring for his beautiful corn snake Olivia, or baking a pie wit
h flour he’s ground himself from posole or millet.

  Although Marcia did many memorable exhibitions, none was more so than “Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials,” co-curated with Jim Monte, and still written about today as having identified a new movement in art. Including film, music, and extended time pieces, as well as sculpture and painting, artists used such materials as felt, hay, ice, chalk, graphite, air, and tissue paper to create works in situ, works the curators wouldn’t see until they were actually made. This was a radical departure. As Jim Monte wrote, the new materials were not the issue: “The acts of conceiving and placing the pieces take precedence over the object quality of the works.”

  Attempting to explain the new movement, Marcia wrote that the exhibition challenged our assumption that “our understanding of a work of art is equivalent to our grasp of the formal or conceptual order inherent in it.” Artistic perception could frustrate our “tyrannous drive to order,” could help us to see that the irrelevant might, actually, be the most relevant.

  The artists in this exhibition altered perceptions with their ideas about time, order, and the changing, ephemeral nature of art and therefore everything — visual artists such as Carl Andre, Eva Hesse, Barry Le Va, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, and Richard Tuttle, composers such as Steve Reich and Philip Glass.

  Each artist was given a space of his or her own. One, Rafael Ferrer, chose the concrete bridge leading to the Museum. On it, he placed straw and huge chunks of ice, which slowly melted. The wet and the dry, decaying at different speeds, reminding us, before we even entered the Museum, of the passing of time, the passing of the Museum, the passing of ourselves.

  Arriving at the Whitney’s enormous elevator, or exiting from it, visitors found the passage almost blocked with an immense rock, placed there by the same artist. Not so easy, perhaps, to really enter the Whitney, to penetrate what we’d see there!